You get the terrific Anne-Sophie Mutter in three smashing violin works.

Record Review /
John Simon,
New Leader (New York) / 01. May 2005

Anne-Sophie Mutter, . . . is, predictably, a magnificent advocate in this splendid live recording . . . while the French National Orchestra under Kurt Masur is a sensitive foil. The coupling of Mutter's much earlier accounts of Bartók and Stravinsky is no less enticing. These were key figures in Dutilleux's development, and the juxtaposition of the new work with Bartók's Second Concerto is a masterstroke. These are fullblooded performances, with plenty of nuance and finesse . . . this disc can be recommended wholeheartedly.

Mutter¿s performance . . . offers a combination of vitality and virtuosity with sensitivity and nuance sufficent to maintain its place among the handful of most appealing and accessible accounts . . . Highly recommended.

Record Review /
Robert Maxham,
Fanfare (Tenafly, NJ) / 01. July 2005

Dutilleux's nine-minute Nocturne . . . bristles with challenging events. As usual, with her extraordinary technical command, Mutter manages to make even the most daunting passages seem simple. The choicest item on this exceptional CD, however, is Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto no. 2 . . . Mutter's sensitive lyricism, fiery virtuosity and rapturous tone in the first movement keep me listening again and again. There is also a jaunty performance of Stravinsky's Violin Concerto in D recorded . . . The two arias of the interior movements are particularly beautiful.

Even if you have the Bartók and Stravinsky concertos in your collection, I strongly advise you to get this CD for the sake of the Dutilleux. It is a very impressive piece, of a significance out of all proportion to its length. It is as though Dutilleux has written a three-movement violin concerto concentrated into ten minutes, encompassing a wide range of mood but without epigrammatic expression or short-windedness. It is an extraordinary achievement . . . and is magnificently played. The Bartók Second is the well-known recording with the Boston Symphony under Ozawa, a powerful and thrilling performance, and the Stravinsky, superbly played throughout with character and humour . . . This desirable collection is very well recorded . . . This is strongly recommended.

Record Review /
Robert Matthew-Walker,
International Record Review (London) / 01. January 2006

Most of the great violin concertos are dual creations, works of dialogue between a composer and a chosen soloist. That was how it was in the 1930s, when Stravinsky wrote for the Polish-American violinist Samuel Dushkin and Bartók for his fellow Hungarian, Zoltán Székely. And that was how it was several decades later, when Dutilleux produced his piece for Anne-Sophie Mutter. But where both the earlier partnerships were rooted in practical experience – Stravinsky worked with Dushkin while writing his concerto, and Bartók, as a pianist, had given recitals with Székely – Sur le même accord is more a dream meeting.

Stravinsky encountered Dushkin in 1930 at the suggestion of his German publisher, Willy Strecker, who felt that a violin concerto would be a suitable work to follow a piano concerto (Capriccio) and a symphony (of psalms). The composer evidently agreed and soon came up with an idea: a three-note chord, D–E–A, spread wide. Dushkin had doubts about it, but then found that it could be managed, and so Stravinsky had what he called his “passport” to the concerto. This document is duly produced at the entry to each of the four movements.

Like much else in the work, the passport chord is thoroughly violinistic but at the same time stretched, going against the grain. Tonal harmony, too, is put under stress. The work is nominally in D, but this is not the violin’s home territory that was explored in the similarly D-centred concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The soloist here plays almost continuously, against varying groupings from an orchestra in which full symphonic winds are combined with chamber-scale strings.

Of the four movements, the middle two are songs, in D minor and F sharp minor, and the outer two jump from one thing to another, propelled by a strong rhythmic pulse. The opening Toccata, unchanging in speed, has the violin going with the easy glide of a trapeze artist, while the final Capriccio is bound more by the persistent interval of a semitone, through which at one point the soloist is invited to witness the Rite of Spring.

The work was given its first performance, by Dushkin, in Berlin on 23 October 1931. Stravinsky conducted. Bartók, by contrast, was not there when Székely introduced his concerto, in Amsterdam on 23 March 1939, with Willem Mengelberg conducting. Four years later, when at last he heard the piece, he expressed relief that there were no problems with the orchestration.

Indeed there were not. Composed in 1937–38, the concerto conveys a supreme creative confidence, in the face of uncertainty and hazard. The principal key, a glowing B major, is offset by modal colourings, quarter-tones at one point in the first movement and, also in the first movement, a second subject that is almost a twelve-note row (but adds a 13th note in repeating the A with which it began). Unhurried march tempo supports the first movement’s impression of grand ease.

Apparently Bartók’s original wish was to create a large-scale set of variations for violin and orchestra. Székely, who was commissioning the work, was disappointed by this proposal, wanting a proper three-movement concerto, and Bartók duly obliged him. But the composer also had his own way, for not only is the slow movement loosely in variation form but the finale is a wholesale variant of the opening movement.

Such variational expertise is paramount also in the Dutilleux piece, whose title – “On the one chord” – indicates how all the music unfolds in transformations of the pattern of six notes heard at the start. Effortless as it seems, though, this nocturne was a long time in the making. As Mutter has recalled, she was 16 when the work was commissioned, by Paul Sacher, and in her 30s by the time it arrived. She gave the first performance in London on 28 April 2002, with Kurt Masur conducting.

“The concerto that really triggered my desire for a piece of my very own”, she explained, “was Dutilleux’s cel-lo concerto Tout un monde lointain, which made an enormous impression on me with its sublime sound colours, its wonderful writing for the solo string instrument and its beautiful tension between lyricism and elements that are percussive, highly sophisticated rhythmically. Now, Dutilleux is a composer who reinvents his language in every piece, but I find those same qualities in Sur le même accord. To me he is the greatest living composer.

“He is also a composer who struggles with his own works and it is only after minute reversions that something heavenly results. At first he wasn’t satisfied with the ending, and he sent me a new version, which I learned halfheartedly, because I was sure there would be more. And there were: two more versions after that.

“What’s also extraordinary is that he knows every detail of his music. At one rehearsal there was a question about the parts for the second fiddles, and he got up immediately and wrote out four or five bars from memory.”

Composed with exactitude and tenacity, the work nevertheless suggests improvisatory freedom. It is, Mutter says, “an aria”. Virtuosity is required, but so too is songfulness. In that, in its persistently striving song, the piece seems modelled on its destined performer.

When Bartók’s Violin Concerto no.2 was premièred in 1939, and for nearly 20 years after that, it was always billed as the Bartók Violin Concerto. Now, however, it must be regarded as the Second Violin Concerto, owing to the posthumous revival of a work that Bartók had written in 1907-08 for the violinist Stefi Geyer, with whom he was particularly close in those years. Later they became estranged, and she never played the work, though she lived until 1956. Only after her death was it premièred – in Basle in 1958 – since which time we must speak of two Bartók violin concertos.

On 1 September 1936 Bartók mentioned to his publishers, Universal Edition of Vienna, that he had some sketches for a new, unspecified work. A few days later, after finishing the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, he wrote asking Universal to send some scores of violin concertos, which suggests that he was studying the various technical problems of the genre (particularly, one assumes, the treatment of the orchestra versus the soloist). Universal sent him works by Kurt Weill, Karol Szymanowski and Alban Berg.

About the same time, Bartók’s friend Zoltán Székely asked if he would write a violin concerto for him. The composer had probably developed his ideas already, since he tended to work out his compositions quite extensively in his head before setting pen to paper. Bartók proposed writing a set of variations for violin and orchestra. Székely held out for a full concerto. In the end, both men were happy. The concerto that Székely premièred contained the normal three movements, while Bartók cleverly got his way, too, by making the middle movement a formal set of variations; and the last movement is, in essence, a variation of the first. Even the restatements within the sonata-form structure of the first and last movements are essentially new variations. But all of this is only another example of what Bartók himself called “my natural tendency to vary and transform”.

Bartók may have taken the idea for this kind of treatment from Liszt’s Faust Symphony, a work he admired enormously. In that remarkable composition the first movement depicts Faust himself, while the last movement – treating Mephistopheles as “the spirit of negation” – is an ironic variation with every thematic idea twisted into a sardonic nose-thumbing version of itself. Bartók’s finale does not have the cynical quality of Liszt’s, but it transforms the noble cantabile themes of the first movement into energetic folk dances.

Although Bartók was normally a fast worker, the concerto took a long time to finish, a fact that depressed him somewhat. More worrying was the growing threat of Germany. When Bartók began the piece, he had not yet thought of leaving his native Hungary; by the time the work was finished it was becoming increasingly clear that his emigration could not be long postponed.

[Zoltán Székely, for whom Bartók wrote the work, had studied the violin with Hubay and composition with Kodály. He was the first violinist of the Hungarian String Quartet from shortly after its founding until it was disbanded in 1970 (by which time the ensemble had been in the United States for some 20 years). Moreover Székely had been Bartók’s frequent partner in duet recitals, clearly motivating the concerto’s dedication, “To my dear friend Zoltán Székely”.]

Following its première in Amsterdam in 1939, the concerto quickly travelled abroad and was taken up by several violinists in the United States. Once Bartók settled there, players were further encouraged not only by the composer’s presence but by the favourable reaction of conductors. Early in 1944 Bartók wrote to his old friend Joseph Szigeti, who had not yet performed the work, though Bartók strongly hoped to hear him in it:

My dear Joe,

… There might still be a possibility with Ormandy. He wrote to me about another matter and mentioned … how he would like to play it with you in Phil., because he had heard it on the radio and thinks that such a viol. concerto had not been written since Beeth., Mendels. and Brahms. Sic Ormandy!

It has often been noted how Bartók’s late music found ways of reconciling his advanced sense of form and harmonic structure with a new directness of melodic invention, largely derived from Hungarian folk music, that made these late works far more accessible to audiences than many of the brilliant but knotty compositions of his youth. The Violin Concerto no. 2 certainly demonstrates the immediacy of his late style. It would not be too much to say that the work is in B major (with many shadings of the minor), though a typically Bartókian B major: its tonal pole does not lie at F sharp, as traditional harmony would dictate, but at F, a tritone away from the home key and its diametrical opposite in the tonal harmonic system. The opening violin theme is a broad, noble melody in a verbunkos march rhythm that asserts the key of B while simultaneously beginning to undermine it with the instability of a generally chromatic language. The chromaticism eventually takes over in the striking form of a new lyrical melody in the violin that is completely chromatic, containing all twelve notes of the scale, yet of a singing character throughout.

The movement is cast as a full-scale sonata form, with an elaborate and difficult cadenza shortly before the end. This is introduced by Bartók’s first use of quarter-tones, shading the pitches just above and below a unison D, which at least one critic considers to be possibly an ironic reference to the great violin concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky.

For all his interest in varying his musical ideas with every restatement, the slow movement of this concerto is Bartók’s only complete traditional variation set, with six variations following the statement of the theme. The orchestral coloration offers a wonderful contrast to the vigorous and assertive sound of the outer movements. The instrumentation is exquisitely delicate, with only one brass instrument and a marvellously imaginative use of percussion. The last movement recasts the first, structurally and thematically, as a gigantic variation, filled with tremendous energy and brio to the very end.